Got Personality

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“Got Personality” – A cartoon that illustrates how AI models’ personalities are becoming visible in the wild.

We didn’t set out to give AI a personality, but we’re starting to put it in situations where personality matters. The moment models stopped answering exam questions and started making decisions, especially when money was on the line, their differences started looking like temperament. 

A recent live trading experiment made this clear. Frontier models from OpenAIGoogleAnthropicxAI, and Chinese labs like DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen were given identical capital ($350K), data, and constraints. Over roughly two weeks, outcomes ranged from gains above 30% to losses exceeding 25%. What separated them wasn’t raw intelligence. It was how they reacted under pressure.

DeepSeek and Qwen traded with structure and conviction, closer to systematic or macro funds than reactive traders. They concentrated risk, adjusted positions mid-trade, and stuck with a thesis longer than most humans would. Google’s Gemini behaved in a way anyone who has watched retail trading would recognize … flipping positions after losses and hedging quickly after gains, driven by recent outcomes rather than structure. Anthropic’s Claude sat between the two. Thoughtful and patient, but occasionally undone by position sizing. OpenAI’s GPT models showed the sharpest evolution. Early versions overtraded and overleveraged. A later incremental release tightened risk controls and jumped from near the bottom of the table to near the top without any change in market conditions.

Even xAI’s Grok split into two personalities. One version leaned into volatility and imploded. Its successor imposed boundaries and finished as the strongest performer.

These behavior personalities are shaped by data, alignment, and incentives. As AI models continue to retrain and specialize, their personalities will diverge. Choosing an AI will feel less like picking software, and more like deciding who you want in the room when decisions get hard.


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  • “See the plan is to systematically get people to trust more and more into AI with your planning, life style, relationships, and decisions. Ultimately just like text destroy verbal communication, AI will bring a dependency. This dependency will be rooted so deep this time, it will make it almost impossible for people to make the smallest of decisions before consulting with AI. This means, we’ll be fully replaced and dispalced to become fully incapacitated. I saw this coming 5 years back. Unfortunately, culture is stronger than the process to avoid it, there is not much to do. Just seat down and ease to the next level.”
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    Michael Gomez
    AI Product Designer & Strategist
  • “Personality differences has been the major driver why I pay three monthly subscriptions and switch between models a couple times a day.”
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    Lev Gorelov, MS
    Treasure trove of generative AI resources
  • “The idea that AI selection is shifting from software choice to hiring a teammate is a game-changer. Another great toon and some serious food for thought on how we vet the tech in our corner.”
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    Blessilla Villegas
    Providing Reliable Virtual Assistants from the Philippines
  • “It turns out “Got Personality?” is less a cartoon and more a Wall Street reality show for AI models—who knew your trader bot might have the temperament of a moody friend? Love how these experiments put real stress on models instead of just quiz questions, and suddenly personalities aren’t just quirks, they’re business-critical strategies.
    If you want your AI to show up with the right personality for the job—even under pressure—https://www.chat-data.com/ lets you customize agent personas, tweak risk parameters, and train on your proprietary data streams. That means whether you need a cool-headed analyst or a strategic risk-taker, you’re in control of the “vibe” that drives decisions and results.”
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    Chat Data

Sources:

Sammi Bovitz (Sep 05, 2025) – How AI Got A New And Improved Personality – USC Viterbi School

Breanne White (Nov 18, 2025) – Turns out AI models have distinct personalities—and we can now measure them. LinkedIn

Phil Nolan (Aug 20, 2025) – Embracing A World Of Many AI Personalities – Noema Magazine

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